Kepos Street Kitchen's Kristy Frawley, Michael Rantissi talk Canberra, cookbook

• Lamb burgers with Middle Eastern coleslaw
• Cauliflower and cranberry salad
• Mini fig and walnut cakes with mascarpone

If Kristy Frawley's​ name sounds familiar, you just need to take a stroll down Garema Place. Yes, she's a member of the Frawley family, whose name adorns the shoe store next to Landspeed Records and Impact Comics. And the ones who own the FSW shoe warehouse stores.

But she'll also be familiar to foodies for the casually brilliant, much-lauded Kepos Street Kitchen in Sydney, the restaurant she runs with partner and chef Michael Rantissi, which serves up stylish yet homey Israeli food – salads filled with burghul and pomegranates, mains of kefta, or fish spiced with harissa. And now they have a new cookbook of their own, Falafel for Breakfast, which offers modern Middle Eastern dishes to fill the table and share with family and friends.

Frawley and Rantissi are a fun pair to talk to – she's calm, sensible, capable of pursuing a train of thought to the end. He bubbles over with passion for food and loves to interject with funny asides. Here's Frawley talking about her Canberra connection: "I was actually born in Canberra. Dad's family is Frawley and there's been many generations of Frawley who've lived there and they've owned many shoe shops down there. I haven't lived there for many years but I come back over the years regularly to visit..."

And here's Rantissi interjecting. "It's an endless family. It doesn't matter how many times there is always a cousin that I haven't met yet." Frawley has to give him this one. "They come in to the restaurant and they go 'Oh hi, I'm Kristy's cousin.' and Michael goes, 'OK, another one!'... We're a good Catholic family."

Frawley and Rantissi met at Serge Dansereau's Bathers' Pavilion, where he was a sous chef and she was – and still does – work for Dansereau in admin. "It was the hot secretary and the good cook," Rantissi says right away. You can almost hear Frawley elbow him with a laugh. "We weren't even friends, we were just work colleagues and then started to go out after he left [Bathers']."

It helped that Frawley was an excellent cook herself. "The first night I cooked for Michael I made him laksa and I'm sure he was thinking 'Oh yeah, who's this girl who's invited me over for dinner?' but he went back for seconds – and I know now that if he doesn't like something he will barely eat it. So for him to eat seconds on the first meal that I cooked for him, we both knew we were on to a good thing." That was nearly nine years ago. "We're almost up for long service leave in the relationship," she says. Rantissi can't help himself: "Does that mean I get 40 days' paid leave?"

They both loved food, fine wine, good company, hosting dinner parties and casual gatherings. And they both came from big families. Rantissi grew up in Tel Aviv and came to Australia to work and see the world. And so Frawley's family – right down to the Canberrans – have embraced him into the fold.

Kepos Street Kitchen came about in part because Rantissi wanted to cook the cosmopolitan Israeli dishes of his childhood and home. "It's quite funny, if I had opened the restaurant back home with my qualifications people would have made fun of me," he says.

"We never had the intention of cooking this food in the restaurant – it's the food that we tend to cook at home. It's lovely how every time we had friends over everybody would go, "Oh my God, what is this food, why can't we really find it in restaurants? Why don't you do a restaurant with this kind of food?'"

So they did. And the cookbook has plenty of dishes to reflect that. "Most of the Mediterranean food is all about the mix and matching and about the plentiful table and the variety more than the individuality of eating," Rantissi says. There are plenty of salads and dips, stews with lamb and chickpeas, spatchcocks stuffed with pine nuts, chocolate and halva brownies and a whole section of refreshing drinks. It's designed to create a spread on the table to accommodate a changing number of guests.

"If you have another couple or another family coming over for dinner, here in Australia my mother would have gone 'Oh we don't have enough meat what will I do?'" Frawley says. "But Michael's philosophy is add another salad or add another dip to your menu and then you can create your shared table."

And what's next on the horizon? They've recently opened an outpost of Kepos Street Kitchen. The cookbook is out now. Could a TV show be next? "It seems like everybody is saying 'You should do this!' and the next day we get a phone call for exactly that thing!" Rantissi guffaws. "So please don't wish us more things at the moment." What about wishing $25 million on them? He can't help himself. "Yes. That will be fine."

Falafel for Breakfast is published by Allen and Unwin. $49.99